Nervous Rich People and a Bad Moon Rising

There's a kind of paranoid meanness in the air — and, in keeping with today's theme, that's another reason not to underestimate the power that is Willard Romney, by the way — and one of the ways you know it is that it's beginning to filter down from the rarefied air of the plutocracy down through the courtier press. We've already had Bill Keller, telling all of "us" that only by developing a taste for Meow Mix can "we" safeguard the future of the Republic. Now, there's Charles Lane, who almost never misses a chance to kiss up and/or kick down, cautioning us that crafty cripples are pillaging the public fisc. At $1100 per month or, roughly, I suspect, what Lane tips at valet parking.

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I don't mean to imply that all, or even most, SSDI beneficiaries are malingering. Indeed, some of the recent increase in enrollment would have occurred anyway due to the aging of the population.

Of course, you don't mean to imply that, because then you would be an obvious sociopath, although, in that case, Fred Hiatt would probably give you a raise.

The good folks at CEPR handed out the the detailed flogging that Lane deserved. But then, with the help of Professor Krugman, we move along to New York magazine, wherein we discover that various toffs and swells are hearing in the distance the clack of the tumbrels and the snick of the blade.

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[Jeff] Greene made his fortune in real estate, and he's never been shy about showing it off. "Having money is great," he says. "It's fun. The more the better." For years, he was a fixture on the party circuit, and celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and his old roommate Heidi Fleiss were not uncommon sights on his yacht, The Summerwind. In 2006, after an old friend, John Paulson, showed him how he was planning to short the impending housing bust, he replicated the trade and made himself a billionaire. Since then he's settled down, married a bubbly Chinese-Australian woman named Mei-Sze, had two children, and changed positions once again. "I've got a huge, huge position in mortgage-backed securities," he says. "I started accumulating them in 2009, when the market was really down and things were really scary." That's also when he picked up this property for around $40 million (half the 2007 listing price), which he and his wife have christened "Greene Haven." "I wish we could spend more time here," he says. "Honestly, we have so many great homes."

Cholera futures were a tougher risk, I reckon.

It's strange to imagine someone like Greene, who counts Mike Tyson as a close friend, and who has a streak that caused the L.A. party girls to refer to him as "Mean Jeff Greene," feeling vulnerable.

"This is my fear, and it's a real, legitimate fear," Greene says, revving up the engine. "You have this huge, huge class of people who are impoverished. If we keep doing what we're doing, we will build a class of poor people that will take over this country, and the country will not look like what it does today. It will be a different economy, rights, all that stuff will be different." More often than not, fears like these manifest as loathing for the current administration, as evidenced by the recent wave of Romney fund-raisers in the Hamptons. "Obama wants to take my money and give it to do-nothing animals," one matron blurted at a recent party at the Pierre for Dick Morris's Screwed!, the latest entry into a growing pile of socioeconomic snuff porn geared toward this audience.

Oh, just bite me, please. More from the "Democrat," Mr. Greene.

"There are all these people in this country who are just not participating in the American Dream at all," he says. This makes him uncomfortable, not least because they might try to take a piece of his. "Right now, for some bizarre reason, a lot of these people are supporting Republicans who want to cut taxes on the wealthy," he says. "At some point, if we keep doing this, their numbers are going to keep swelling, it won't be an Obama or a Romney. It will be a ­Hollande. A Chávez."

This is a political culture that barely tolerates Bernie Sanders. This is a political culture in which the people who have little are encouraged at almost every level to hate and fear the people with nothing. The people who read Charles Lane or Bill Keller and imagine that the bell never tolls for them. They're your great bulwark, Jeff. The former middle-class that's maintained nothing but its political pretensions. Buy another house, dude. You're cool.